ART REVIEWS : Merrild’s Humorous Slant on Cubism

The comic side of Modernist Abstraction sneaks out of hiding in an exhibition of works from the 1930s and ‘40s by Knud Merrild (1908-54). About 30 small drawings, odd collages, pristine reliefs and poured paintings at the Steve Turner Gallery chart the Danish artist’s sudden transformation.

Throughout the ‘30s, Merrild’s art consisted of meticulously crafted reliefs and delicate drawings that illustrated the formal principles at the root of Cubism. Where Picasso and Braque favored colliding planes and dissolving illusions, Merrild stuck to the abstract representation of readily identifiable objects.

His simplified still-lifes and schematic biomorphic forms possess a flat-footed charm that saves them from being merely derivative. Always unassuming and sometimes downright funny, his little pictures astound in their willingness to take the perceptual uncertainties of Cubism as a stable basis for picture-making.

Remarkably, the harmony and balance--even stasis--of Merrild’s early works completely deny Cubism’s radical doubts about illusionism, while his images seem to remain true to that style’s intentions and procedures.

In the early ‘40s, Merrild abandoned his attempt to work through the artistic strategies established by European Modernism. He began to pour and drip tiny streams of oil paint onto small canvases in patterns governed by gravity and the ways different enamels chemically react with one another.

What resulted was a curious and original body of work that anticipated Pollock’s famous drip paintings from 1947-50 and established Merrild as an inventor of a new pictorial order. He called these works his “Flux Paintings.”

Although art historians are quick to note the similarities between Merrild’s pours and Pollock’s drips, too many differences distinguish these artists from one another. Claiming significance for Merrild’s paintings in terms of Pollock’s canvases is a form of reverse discrimination--it allows under-recognized artists into history only when they seem to echo the achievements of accepted masters. They are original because they employ a sort of Surrealist-derived automatic writing without referring to the artist’s unconscious or representing authentically expressive traces of his inarticulate inner self.

Merrild’s mutant designs anticipate much of what is interesting in Process Art and Pattern-and-Decoration paintings. Their unnatural palette and noxious viscosity also led to much Californian abstraction since the ‘60s that has used industrial materials such as resin and Plexiglas.

More humorous than authoritative, his paintings are fecund without being seminal. If their lack of bombast has kept them out of the spotlight for almost 50 years, it has also preserved their richness for anyone willing to follow their idiosyncratic, quiet movements.

* Steve Turner Gallery, 7220 Beverly Blvd., (213) 931-1185, through Nov. 16. Closed Sundays - Tuesdays .

Childhood Visions: In Robert Gil de Montes’ clumsy paintings, childhood sometimes returns. When it does, it comes back as a troubled time when wisdom accompanied simplicity.

For the most part, however, his crudely rendered images of masked figures and symbolic objects do not recapture the integrity and directness possessed by children, but demonstrate that conjuring the power of a child’s imagination is no simple task.

Gil de Montes’ attempts to make paintings based on artlessness often fall flat because they forget that figurative images depend, for their effectiveness, upon sophistication, illusion and deception. By trying to deny artifice and lies, his paintings usually end up as hackneyed renditions of yesterday’s original pictures rather than as today’s manifestations of childhood innocence.

The best works in his concurrent exhibitions at Barnsdall Art Park’s Junior Arts Center and Jan Baum Gallery acknowledge both the silliness of children and the deceptiveness at the basis of figurative painting.

When Gil de Montes scales down his paintings and focuses on totally theatrical subjects--such as figures dressed as jaguars, mosquitoes or fish--his images take on a dream-like quality in which anything seems possible. This is when it achieves a freshness paralleled only by the vision of a child.

* The Junior Arts Center, Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 485-4581, through Sunday. * Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 932-0170, through Nov. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

History Lesson: Maija Beeton’s video installation argues that what we know as civilization is inextricably linked to nature.

By transforming the gallery of Sue Spaid Fine Art into a veranda-like setting whose pleasantness is upset by four televisions broadcasting tapes related to CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War, “The Desert in the Garden” criticizes our tendency to forget that Los Angeles was once a desert and that the war occurred in Mesopotamia, the “cradle of civilization.”

Beeton’s installation is also a thinly veiled attack on the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, whose 1986 book, “America,” holds history in suspension in order to reflect on the character of our nation’s inhabitants. Beeton’s art disallows such thinking because it doesn’t serve clear political ends. Her historicism turns art’s capacity to explore uncertainty into the illustration of predetermined meanings.

* Sue Spaid Fine Art, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., (213) 935-6153, through Sunday.